How To Keep New York Times From Refreshing In Firefox

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/26/engineering science/personaltech/browsers-minimize-data.html

TECH TIP

Means to Lighten Your Data Load

A browser that's set up to compress or block images, ads and other bandwidth-hogging parts of a web page tin can save you megabytes.

July 26, 2022

Q. I live in a rural area with an extremely slow, metered connection and limited cyberspace bandwidth. I more often than not apply the web on my computer to read news manufactures, so is there a style to cake everything except the text from downloading to salve megabytes?

A. Most commonly used browsers — including Google Chrome. Microsoft Cyberspace Explorer and Mozilla Firefox — have a setting that allows you to disable image files from loading with a web page. When you turn on the Develop menu in the Preferences of Apple's Safari browser, you get a Disable Images option.

If you don't care to wade effectually in settings and configurations files, you can probably find a 3rd-party improver to block (or permit, on demand) images, videos and other visual content. To minimize the time and megabytes spent online, some people even use a browser's "reader" mode to cut and paste text into a discussion-processing document for reading or printing later, or bookmark pages for offline reading afterwards.

Opera, like many other browsers, can be set to stop images on a page from loading. — Credit... The New York Times

For those wishing to salve bandwidth and battery, the desktop Opera browser has some appealing built-in features, and the option to block images is easily institute in the program'south settings. If you desire to keep pictures loading but reduce the amount of data consumed, Opera has a "turbo" style that compresses images, as well as its own ad blocker, a virtual private network and a battery saver feature that minimizes groundwork activity. (Other browsers may take similar add-ons, like Google'due south Data Saver extension available in the Chrome Web Store.)

If y'all're feeling technically audacious (or cornball), some text-only browsers are effectually. These include Lynx, which dates back to the early 1990s, and the much newer Browsh.

Browsers that shrink data are besides bachelor for mobile devices. Dolphin, Opera Mini and the UC Browser are options, as is the Google Chrome app.

Personal Tech invites questions about computer-based technology to techtip@nytimes.com . This column will answer questions of general interest, but letters cannot be answered individually.